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Fareed Mosavat

Episode #100

Chief Development Officer

Reforge

🚀Career & Leadership🎯Product Strategy⚡Execution

📝Full Transcript

13,378 words
Fareed Mosavat (00:00:00): You can't do homework. You can't do exercises. You can't do fake stuff. You have to work on real products at real companies with real customers, with real data to get better at product management. So any kind of training, mentorship, reading, et cetera that you do is just a layer on top of that. The real acceleration happens from doing it and getting more reps. There are ways that I think great PMs use to go faster on this loop, but you still have to do the work. At the core is you have to actually execute and deliver great products, and you have to do it over, and over, and over again. Lenny (00:00:40): Fareed Mosavat is the Chief Development Officer at Reforge where he's been for over two and a half years. Before that, he spent three and a half years at Slack leading a lot of their growth efforts, about a year at Instacart leading a number of their key growth analytics and product efforts. He's a GM at Zynga, he's VP of Product at Runkeeper, and something that I only learned during our chat is that he spent six years at Pixar doing character simulation, rigging, and building 3D animation tools. In our conversation, we focus on the journey of becoming a great PM, including crossing the canyon from IC to manager, the importance of expanding your scope, and how to create opportunities where you get more responsibility as a PM. Fareed is such an A-plus human full of so much insight, and I'm really excited for you to learn from him. With that, I bring you Fareed Mosavat. Lenny (00:01:32): This episode is brought to you by Coda. Coda is an all-in-one doc that combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps in one place. I actually use Coda every single day. It's my home base for organizing my newsletter writing. It's where I plan my content calendar, capture my research, and write the first drafts of each and every post. It's also where I curate my private knowledge repository for paid newsletter subscribers, and it's also how I manag...

💡 Key Takeaways

  • 1To accelerate your career, move from 'Execution' to 'Generalization'—don't just ship a feature; abstract the principle behind why it worked to apply it elsewhere.
  • 2Practice 'Strategic Curiosity' by understanding the business two levels up (strategy/board), two levels down (technical/data), and across functions (sales/marketing).
  • 3Seek sponsorship over mentorship; sponsorship creates opportunities and is earned by solving the organization's most critical problems.
  • 4Avoid the 'Manager Death Spiral' by shifting your mindset from 'doing the work' to 'editing the work' and trusting your team with high-leverage problems.
  • 5Stop acting like a victim of resource constraints; explicitly map the required resources to the desired business outcome and ask for them.
  • 6Audit your roadmap against the 'Four Types of Product Work' to ensure you aren't over-indexing on your personal strengths (e.g., a Growth PM ignoring technical scaling).

📚Methodologies (4)

The PM Learning Loop

by Fareed Mosavat

🚀 Career & Leadership

A cyclical process for accelerating product mastery. It moves beyond simple execution to ensuring that every project builds intellectual capital and organizational trust, allowing the PM to tackle increasingly ambiguous problems.

Core Principles

  • 1.Step 1: Execute - Work on real products with real data (no fake homework).
  • 2.Step 2: Generalize - Abstract the specific win into a broader mental model (e.g., 'High friction onboarding works for high-intent products').
  • 3.Step 3: Communicate - explicitly share both the work and the generalized learning to the org.
  • +1 more...

"The real acceleration happens from doing it and getting more reps... but you have to generalize lessons effectively."

#learning#career#leadership
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🎯 Product Strategy

A framework for understanding context. A PM must actively research the organization vertically and horizontally to identify leverage points and build sponsorship trust.

Core Principles

  • 1.Vertical Scan (2 Up/2 Down): Understand your boss's goals and *their* boss's goals (Up). Understand the technical stack, dunning logic, and database constraints (Down).
  • 2.Horizontal Scan (Left/Right): Understand what adjacent teams (Sales, Marketing, Core Product) are prioritizing.
  • 3.Connect the Dots: Identify how your specific work creates leverage for these surrounding stakeholders.
  • +1 more...

"I like two stack levels because it's like you should understand your boss's priorities and your boss's boss's priorities."

#strategic#curiosity#matrix
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🎯 Product Strategy

A taxonomy for portfolio management. A leader must ensure their team is balancing their effort across four distinct categories of value creation, rather than treating every problem like a nail for their specific hammer.

Core Principles

  • 1.Type 1: Feature Work - Creating value for existing customers (retention/engagement focus).
  • 2.Type 2: Growth Work - Connecting customers to existing value (acquisition/monetization focus).
  • 3.Type 3: PMF Expansion - New value for new markets (verticalization) or new products for existing markets (bundling).
  • +1 more...

"If you want to be a product leader, you cannot be seen solely as a specialist in that certain kind of product work."

#types#product#strategy
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The Outcome-Resource Lock

by Fareed Mosavat

⚡ Execution

A negotiation framework for leaders. Instead of doing 'the best we can with what we have,' the leader defines the resources strictly required to hit the business goal.

Core Principles

  • 1.Step 1: Define the uncompromised business outcome required.
  • 2.Step 2: Calculate the true resource cost (headcount, marketing budget, time) to guarantee that outcome.
  • 3.Step 3: Present the gap. 'To hit [Goal X], we need [Y resources]. With current resources, we can only hit [Goal Z].'
  • +1 more...

"It is not just your job to get what you can get done with the resources in front of you. It's your job to marshal resources... to have the most impact."

#outcome-resource#execution#process
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